21 book covers for JG Ballard

Forgive me for my increasingly infrequent entries here, on my venerable website. I now seem to update my virtual existence by posting pictures and obscure messages on to Twitter and Instagram. I’d never have imagined it, to be honest; I’ve long had a deeply held distrust and a trenchantly cynical view regarding what’s called ‘social media’, but it’s got me, just like it’s got pretty much everyone else. But still, I offer my apologies.

Anyway, anyway. As you can see from just above, I have an exhibition opening soon in London, which will be showing the artwork I made for JG Ballard’s novels. It’s at the Lawrence Alkin gallery, near Centre Point at the eastern end of Oxford Street. There will be some sort of opening event on the evening of Thursday 26th March, and it might be an idea to get in touch with the gallery to find out about that. Me, I have no idea.

It was a tremendous honour to be asked to create the covers for JG Ballard’s books. He’s possibly my favourite author of the 20th (and a bit of the 21st) century, and someone whose books I’ve reread loads of times. To my mind, his incredibly incisive take on his childhood and his childhood observations made him one of the most prescient students of humanity as it dwelt in the strange edifice of late-period Western capitalism. Who else but Ballard could have begun a novel with the image of an urban professional devouring the remains of a dog on the balcony of his luxury penthouse apartment?

The exhibition will be showing extremely limited Diasec mounted lambda prints of the artwork I produced for the 21 covers. Smaller giclée editions of each will also be available.